Ratzinger, Joseph, and Peter Seewald. God and the World: Believing and Living in Our Time: A Conversation with Peter Seewald. Translated by Henry Taylor. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2002. Pages 397-398

Now, as in former times, many people make use of Christian expressions, although they are no longer familiar with their content, let alone live according to them. Let us consider the seven sacraments. You once said about them that within them was contained the design for the whole of our life. And Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was brought up as a Protestant, maintained that the sacraments of the Catholic Church were not only “the highest expression of religion” but, further, the “sensible symbol of an extraordinary divine favor and grace”.

Before we come to the individual sacraments—I ask myself: What is the real value of these sacraments? Confirmation, for example, gives no guarantee that young people will not look for salvation in a drugged ecstasy, and conferring the sacrament of marriage does not prevent the partners deceiving each other and lying to each other and even separating again within a year.

I believe that the seven sacraments truly hold in place the structure and the great events of human life. For these important moments, for birth and death, for growing up and marrying, we need some kind of sign, to give to this moment its full stature, its true promise, and thus also the dimension of being shared together.

In any case, if we look at the sacraments too much from the viewpoint of efficiency and regard them as a means to impart miraculous powers to man and fundamentally change him, then, as it were, they fail the test. Here we are concerned with something different. Faith is not something that exists in a vacuum; rather, it enters into the material world. And it is through signs from the material world that we are, in turn, brought into contact with God. These signs are therefore an expression of the corporal nature of our faith. The interpenetration of sensual and spiritual dimensions is the logical extension of the fact that God became flesh and shares himself with us in earthly things.

The sacraments are thus a kind of contact with God himself. They show that this faith is not a purely spiritual thing, but one that involves community and creates community and that includes the earth, the creation, which in this way, together with its elements, becomes transparent.

The essential point is that the communal aspect, the corporal dimension of faith, expresses itself in the sacraments and that it is made clear, at the same time, that faith is not something produced within us but comes from a higher authority. Certainly, they are entrusted to our freedom, like everything God does; and—like the gospel as a whole—they do not work in a mechanical way but only in company with our free response.

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Return to Lesson 3: Are the Sacraments Necessary for Salvation?